Recipient: Lonnie Dantzler Occupation: Laborer at NFL Builders Responded On: February 16, 2005 Bill Received At: Greyhound Bus Station Indianapolis, Indiana Originally Dropped At: Giordano's Pizza 9613 South Western Chicago On: February 12 , 2005

 

Lonnie Dantzler's Comments

Does your generation view money differently than your parents' generation, and if so, how?
Money is viewed differently because the dollar doesn’t go as far as it used to. For instance, I was talking to my grandmother one time and I told her I was going to go buy a pack of cigarettes. And she was like, “How much are cigarettes?” I said, “Five dollars.” She thinking, I’m fixing to go buy a whole carton of cigarettes. Because my grandma was eighty-six when she passed, but back in her day, cigarettes was a penny a cigarette. And she just couldn’t believe it when I’m like—that’s one pack of cigarettes that cost five dollars.

But is there a difference in attitude that your generation has vs. your father's generation or your grandmothers' generation?
We spend. We get $100, we going to spend $99. Like my father tell me all the time when I get paid, he says, “You know, save $15 a week or $20 a week. It don’t got to be much, but save something and if you save $15 every week, you have X amount of dollars at the end of the year.”

But you know, I don’t do that. I mean I got a small savings, but I spend. Because I live by myself, so I got rent and food and lights and cost of living and soap powder, tissue … all that kind of stuff. So that little $15 I did throw to the side, I’m spending that tomorrow. Because I don’t have nothing in my pocket now. I spend. I try to save. But what I save, I spend it within two, three days.

In the United States, if people start out in a very low-paying job, can they still become quite wealthy if they work hard enough?
It just depends on how the low-paying job (is) and if the person’s trying to climb up the corporate ladder at that job. You know, like if you working at McDonald’s. You come in. You know you start off at, minimum wage is $6.50 now and you right there at the bottom. But if you know, like okay I’m going to stay here for a minute. I’m not going to go nowhere. You’d have been here two years and you done got two raises. Now you’d have been here your third year, you got you another raise. And you say okay, I’m going to sit right here and see where this gets me. And you keep climbing up that ladder, you know you might be running a McDonald’s of your own within the franchise.

Then somebody might come in like, okay I’ll work the cash register. I’ll do this for right now. And they don’t do nothing else but work that cash register for the next ten years. So they’ll just be at the low-paying job, mad about it, while the other person that has the low-paying job, came up and is quite successful with theyself.

I was talking to a gentleman a few weeks ago and he was talking about people working minimum wage jobs at McDonald's. He didn't feel this way personally, but he said a lot of times people will view workers at McDonald's as just kind of chumps—they're just wasting their time. It sounds like you don't feel that way. It sounds like you feel the right person can make an opportunity out of it.
Yeah, the right person can make an opportunity. But you got to look at, the bills ain’t going to pay themselves. Because with me, ain’t nothing moving but the money. If I had to take a job where I had to be at McDonald’s, then I’m going to do that. If you look at me like, “Oh, he’s this, he’s that,” but I’m doing something honest with myself. You know, it’s a difference if I’m out here selling drugs or robbing or doing this. But if you doing something honest, you can’t knock that. So I mean if you working at McDonald’s, you working at Burger King … If it’s a low paying job and you are dedicated to it—to getting up, going to work, getting that good work ethic in, then it shouldn’t be nothing what anybody should say.

In your household, how do you economize?
In my household I economize, saving money by getting it in change. It might sound funny but you know if I take ten dollars and get ten dollars worth of quarters and I put that in my jug, I know that ten dollars in quarters is the last I’m going to spend. I’m going to spend all my dollars first.

What will you splurge on once in a while?
Wow. What will I splurge on? It just depends on what’s going on. Mostly I will splurge on, besides clothes and sneakers, after everything else is paid up? It’s just me. I’ll splurge on myself as far as me doing what I want to do, whether its going over here to see a movie or over to some friend’s house to kick it, or play station games—I will splurge my money on that.

What is the worst thing you've ever had to do in your life to obtain money?
Wow. I think the worst where I had to obtain money was I was working for a lumber service and, you know, we unload trucks all day. But we get $30 for every truck we unload. So in a truck that came in one time, it was full of Campbell Soup with six in a box and there had to be about a thousand boxes on there. So we had to take the boxes and put them on skids, so high and so wide, and then wrap them up.

It was me and a Mexican guy. We was doing the truck. We would split it. You help me with this one and I’ll help you with that one and so on and so on. And they took him and put him on another truck, which was a box of pillows. And that took me about four, almost four and half hours to get that truck unloaded and shrink-wrapped, in order for them to come and pick them up. And that was the worst, next to babysitting for my family. I love the kids, but too many of them is crazy.

A lot of us, myself included, have kind of fantasies about a certain kind of work that we would like to do. If I could wave my magic wand and say, ok you're going to earn a nice living … if you could do any kind of work to earn money, what kind of work would it be?
All in all, I think it would have to be this construction work that I’m doing now. Because I’m not no sit around type—I don’t think I could do an office job because I need to be moving around, you know. I mean I done had a lot of jobs but this construction job right here, I think is me because I like the feeling of putting my hands on something, getting dirty, getting it done, and when it’s done I look back like, wow, we did that.

We did the Brickyard Mall out there. It’s an Osco now. But when I ride past, I’m like, all that foundation work that this building is standing on—we did it. And it just amazes me that it’s going to be there. And I get to show it off to people like, yeah we did this, we did 79th, we did this over here, we did that … I love it and I wouldn’t want to change it for nothing … I hate that I get laid off in the winter time and have to find a job somewhere else … Now, I can’t wait for it to start back up. Get back out there and get another season going.